How Purchased Email Lists Are Hurting Your Marketing Efforts
E-Marketing! We have to do more e-Marketing! It’s the key to our whole sales effort this month/quarter/year!
Sound familiar? E-mail based marketing has become a cornerstone of sales and branding efforts both large and small. It’s estimated that 44% of email recipients made at least one purchase last year based solely on a promotional email. That’s nearly half the market. If you were to earn at least one additional sale from approximately every other person you emailed, that’d be well worth the time and effort, right?
The unfortunate truth is that it’s not quite so simple. Figures like the above are typically based on those consumers that have either opted-in to e-mail marketing, or have made previous purchases (thus setting up an account and providing an email), or have been targeted based on actual search and/or buying patterns. This is why marketing from a purchased email list often delivers lackluster performance and can even hinder the effectiveness of future e-marketing efforts.
Consider the following statistics gathered from a number of email subscriber studies conducted by ReturnPath, Ipost, and a number of other business experts.
- 17% of Americans create a new email account every 6 months
- 21% of recipients report email as Spam, even if they know it isn’t
- 80% of social network members report receiving unsolicited emails and offers
Why Does it Matter for Purchased Lists?
Let’s start at the beginning. Would you purchase anything for your business that had 17% missing? That’s essentially what happens with email lists containing outdated email addresses. And even for those emails that are current, one of the top reasons people change email addresses so frequently is to try and eliminate or avoid unsolicited marketing efforts. Even cautiously estimating another 8% drop off for such reasons means that you’re only getting three-quarters of the deliveries you’d want… and that assumes each recipient is an ideal prospect.
Which leads to the next two figures – if people aren’t carefully, organically added to your e-marketing lists, the odds are you’ll be spending a lot of time, money, and resources in the wrong direction. There is not a single product in the world that every person must have… that goes for food, clothing, home refinancing, entertainment, and even water. If your email list is assembled at random, then you have no way of honing in on what makes your customers tick, and more importantly, what makes them buy.
But I’ve been promise this list was compiled based on my specifications!
Yes, it’s true email list providers may promise such things, and they may even make an honest attempt at doing so. However, if culled from social media, search engines, and free-product-or-service sign-ups, the validity of that data is questionable at best.
I Need New Customers Now! I Can’t Wait to Grow a List!
Everyone can relate to being in a critical business situation where new sales are vital. Ask yourself though – at what cost? Spam has become such a divisive issue for email account holders that they’ve pushed ISPs and others to regulate e-mail marketing more strictly than you’d expect.
Did you know that email lists with 10% or more unknown users get only 44% of their email delivered? Were you aware that IP addresses appearing on just one of the 12 major email blacklists had email deliverability that was 25 points lower than IP addresses not on the blacklists?
Getting blacklisted means that your server has been digitally tagged for numerous reports of spam. Purchased email lists are one of the most common causes for blacklisting. And it’s not entirely simple to resolve. You may have to move to a new email server. You could be blocked from using email resources in a shared server environment. And you could get “released” from an email clearing house such as MailChimp or Constant Contact for failing to meet user guidelines regarding list validity.
Your internet reputation is at stake every time you use a purchased email list – and the results could mean substantial setbacks for future efforts. What happens the next time you need to make a push for more customers and your hands have been tied because you’re not able to access as many email resources for sending your campaigns and making sure they’re received.
So What Do I Do? You Kompani That
E-mail marketing is one of the essential components we suggest for businesses of all types and sizes. However, we take the approach of building your list through a variety of reliable, sustainable methods which include:
- Opt-in pushes on your website and social-media outlets
- Digital “switch” opportunities for moving paper/direct-mail communications to email
- Drip campaign marketing for growing and expanding your list
- Creating search engine optimized content for attracting new prospects to relevant subject matter and then encouraging opt-in sign up for future communications
- “Share” campaigns and components included as part of all e-marketing efforts
It’s not the instant gratification that purchased lists promise, but rarely deliver. Rather, Kompani Group’s e-marketing approach is infinitely more satisfying in both the short-term and long-term with better results from day 1 onward.